Joe Biden Didn’t Just Lose The White House. He Lost His Legacy.

President Joe Biden’s bid for historical greatness came to grief in one day: Nov. 5, 2024. Had he or Vice President Kamala Harris won the presidential election and a second consecutive Democratic term, history probably would have cast Biden in a heroic light: as the man who returned America to normalcy after the chaos of Donald Trump’s first term; who got the nation back on its feet after the Covid-19 pandemic; who reasserted U.S. leadership in the world after a season of retreat; who rebuilt democracy after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault.

Instead, Biden is now apt to be recalled as a well-intentioned but only moderately effectual placeholder. He had several proud achievements but, owing to his brief tenure and his personal limitations, many of those achievements will likely be dismantled by the very man he believed he had exiled from the seat of power.

The problems were not just his advancing age and declining stamina, which finally became undeniable after the June 2024 debate fiasco that doomed his reelection bid. At bottom, it was also Biden’s habitual inability to size up and address a problem in full: He saw the need to goose the economy after the pandemic but failed to consider the perils of inflation; he came to the defense of Ukraine and Israel but didn’t anticipate the course those wars might take; he fervently believed that Trump threatened democracy but did little to reinforce the guardrails. Always a workhorse, never a visionary, Biden might have been an excellent president in a more placid time. But in the current crisis, which cried out for a Roosevelt, he was only a Biden.

Early in Biden’s presidency, in 2021, many Americans, shaking off the nerve-wracking four-year speedboat ride, exhaled with relief. Biden, encouraged by his victory, came to regard himself — not without reason — as democracy’s savior. Eyeing opportunities to “go big” as the country sloughed off the pandemic, he indulged and even bought into the overwrought comparisons of his agenda to the New Deal. Even more than other presidents, he adopted a grandiose view of his own tenure as a world-historical turning point.

Addled by post-Trump euphoria, pundits in 2021 joined White House flacks in rhapsodizing about the new president, imagining him to be radically more visionary than his recent Democratic forebears. Television talkers parroted the line that Biden was making himself into a “transformational president.” Some claimed, preposterously, that he was our greatest leader since Franklin Roosevelt.

These delusions were rooted in the passage of a single bill, the American Rescue Plan — a significant spending bill designed to hasten the recovery from the pandemic-induced recession. Besides its stimulative spending, the law created a rapid vaccination campaign that helped make social interaction safe again. For all its benefits, though, the plan wasn’t remotely comparable to the jillions of sweeping reforms that FDR implemented in his first 100 days, nor to the scads of initiatives that formed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama passed first-year, out-of-the-gates economic plans at least as significant as Biden’s. Many of Biden’s policies, in fact, pulled directly from the Clinton-Obama storehouse: extending unemployment benefits, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. Biden even claimed to originate the idea of “middle out” economics, when in actuality Obama used the slogan and pursued the philosophy first.

In any case, the American Rescue Plan, for all its virtues, was never going to be the Rooseveltian game-changer that its boosters claimed. The year before, at the height of Covid, Trump had already signed another mammoth relief-and-stimulus bill, the CARES Act. By the time Biden took office, the Covid recession — the shortest in American history — was over.

Later in his presidency, Biden signed three more major bills allocating a great deal more money for manufacturing, infrastructure and clean energy. Had he won reelection, this cumulative record might have rendered the steep inflation of this first two years a fleeting memory and made the otherwise strong economy a centerpiece of his presidential bequest. But his spending bills fueled the highest inflation of any presidency since Jimmy Carter’s and saddled his administration with its biggest liability. Even after the inflation subsided, it fatally hamstrung Harris’ bid to succeed him and shore up his legacy. Now, with much of the allocated money unspent, Trump is poised to undo some of those prospective domestic accomplishments, such as his historic provisions for clean energy.

Trump’s return likewise threatens to reverse much of Biden’s foreign policy record, which was shaping up as his most historic achievement. Despite the devastation of his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, his visceral support for Ukraine and Israel were poised to vindicate his long-held liberal internationalism and strengthen its credibility among younger Democrats and Americans overall. In both cases, however, Biden pulled too many punches, leaving this legacy, too, precariously vulnerable.

Though Biden’s internationalism was robust, it was not hubristic. Like other Democratic presidents since Vietnam (and especially since Iraq), Biden usually balked at putting American boots on the ground; for all his devotion to Ukraine and Israel, he never sent troops to Gaza or the Donbas. In the same vein, he was keen to extricate the military from its Afghanistan peacekeeping role. In 2020, Trump had boxed his successor in by adopting the Doha Accord with the Taliban, setting a timeline and conditions for the American withdrawal. Yet Biden did not seem troubled by those constraints. Back in 2009, as vice president, Biden had lost a fierce internal argument over briefly surging our military presence in Afghanistan. Now that he had the power of the presidency, he resolved that, by gum, he was going to wind down the 20-year operation, notwithstanding a dramatic drop in American combat deaths since 2014.

Tragically, however, the pullout in the summer of 2021 was precipitous, badly planned — why not keep Bagram Air Base? — and, as the administration admitted, miserably executed. It was also that summer when the pain of inflation hit, and the public began to doubt the White House’s claims about its superior professionalism and competency.

Biden hoped to turn the page on the Afghanistan fiasco by rallying the country and the West to help Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion in 2022. Trump had cozied up to Russian President Vladimir Putin; before that, Obama downplayed the threat Russia posed and ceded it a leadership role in settling the Syrian civil war. When Biden took power in 2021, the United States’ readiness and desire to lead the world was an open question.

Biden rose to the occasion. He fortified NATO, adding Finland and Sweden to the alliance. He unified Europe behind the defense of not just Ukraine but also the post-World War II international order itself, reaffirming the principle of national sovereignty. “Putin thought he’d take Kyiv in three days,” Biden said proudly at the Democratic convention last August. “Three years later, Ukraine is still free.” In similar fashion, Biden’s solidarity with Israel in its regional conflicts, though sometimes inconsistent, helped make it possible at least to envision in the mid-range future a more peaceful Middle East in which Hamas (now decimated), Hezbollah (crippled), former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (deposed) and the Islamic Republic of Iran (humbled) no longer foment war.

Although opinion on Biden’s Israel policy has been sharply divided, Ukraine was widely touted as his finest hour. Again, however, his inability to usher in a like-minded heir could well rewrite that verdict. What once looked like visionary fortitude has now come to resemble, at least in some eyes, a too-cautious Goldilocks strategy. Not until November 2023 did Biden let Ukraine use American weaponry against targets in Russia — a delay that may have prolonged the war too much, so that an internationalist American president would not be in office to secure the terms of the its end. Trump may not hand Putin the conquest that the Russian dictator once sought, but neither is the war’s outcome likely now to stand as a clear-cut win for liberal principles. And while Trump is also unlikely to halt further aid to Israel, his closeness to the Netanyahu government could drive even more Democrats into an anti-Israel stance. (Netanyahu has already done much to drive them away.)

Finally, the most important thing Biden promised America in 2020 — a restoration of normal, reasonable, functioning, sane politics — seems farther than ever from reach. Of course, Biden’s mere election did calm the waters — no small thing. No longer did each day bring news of the president insulting random celebrities on Twitter, firing renegade administration members or eroding the norms of democratic governance. But the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress did precious little to shore up democracy as political leaders had after Watergate. The 1887 Electoral Count Act was wisely bolstered. But that was about it: no new laws or constitutional amendments to insulate the Justice Department from White House meddling, or to clarify that the Constitution doesn’t allow presidential self-pardons, or to require that all White House aspirants release tax or medical records, or to bar convicted felons from the Oval Office.

During Trump’s first term, Democrats had come to appreciate the vulnerabilities of American democracy. But they then allowed four years to pass without doing very much to address those vulnerabilities. Biden’s controversial pardon of his son Hunter surely won’t matter much to historians 10 or 50 years from now — pardons seldom loom large in historical evaluations of a president — but it, too, stands as one more opportunity Biden missed to strengthen the norms of good government.

Through all of this, Biden’s maddeningly low public profile prevented him from providing the vigorous public leadership that the times required. After all, Franklin Roosevelt not only implemented 100 days of sweeping reforms; he also gave us the fireside chats — his colloquial, eloquent radio messages to the nation, a breakthrough in presidential leadership, a tool for forging unity and boosting morale in parlous times. After Trump’s first term, the nation similarly needed a relentless campaign to beat back the balkanization, conspiracism and hate-mongering that had come to permeate our politics. Biden didn’t, or couldn’t, mount one.

Few one-term presidents are remembered as unalloyed successes. True, John Adams underwent a rehabilitation some years ago, James K. Polk boasts a proud following and John F. Kennedy remains widely beloved. Mostly, though, if you want history to rank you with the greats, your own people have to award you that vaunted second term. Biden couldn’t pull that off. And now much of what he hoped to bequeath to future generations will be at the mercy of Donald Trump, who is not known to be especially merciful.